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Supported by

Leverhulme Trust

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The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project
(AHOB) was initially funded for five years by the Leverhulme Trust.
With partners from the Natural History Museum, Royal Holloway
University of London, Queen Mary University of London and Durham
University, the project is examining the earliest prehistory of
Britain from the first human colonisers, about 700,000 years ago,
up to the end of the Last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago.

During this period Britain witnessed huge changes in geography,
environment and climate. A succession of ice sheets and intervening
warm phases meant that the landscape of Britain varied from polar
desert and tundra with reindeer, bison and mammoths to dense
deciduous forest with elephant, hippos and rhinos.

The project is examining in detail how humans coped with these
changes in their environment, charting when they were here, what
technologies they used, what animals they hunted and what habitats
they favoured. This is being achieved by identifying sites from the
vast collections held by the British Museum and Natural History
Museum. With new techniques small scale fieldwork is helping to
understand better their environmental context and date of these
sites.

A second phase of the project is now being funded for a further
three years. This aims to place the new information emerging
from Britain into a European perspective.

Objectives

There are six key objectives:

To discover when humans first colonised Britain and northern
Europe;

To improve understanding of the type of habitats chosen by
humans from 700,000 to 300,000 years ago;

To understand better how the development by Neanderthals of a
new stone technology (called Levallois) was part of a broader sweep
of changes that included more organised hunting, selection of more
open habitats and perhaps changes in social organisation from about
300,000 years ago;

To discover why there was a human absence in Britain from
200,000 to 60,000 years ago. Was it linked to the creation of the
English Channel at this time?

To understand better the series of colonisations from 60,000
years ago, from Neanderthals to several waves of modern humans from
35,000 years ago. What technologies did they possess (tools,
clothes, shelters, fire) to allow them survive in Britain in cold,
treeless landscapes;

To understand the final return of humans after the last glacial
maximum, which was a period of extreme cold between 22,000 to
13,000 years ago.